Three Marys – Good Friday, 3 April 2015

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. [John 19:25]

I am drawn to this group of three women, all named Mary.   They were there while Jesus died.  All the men, with one evident exception, had fled.  I am drawn to the fact that we know so little about these three.  The first Mary was Jesus’s mother.  And although very large sections of the Christian Church assume that they know her well, own her and worship her, I don’t.   The person Jesus knew as his mother has long since disappeared behind the immense devotional and doctrinal edifice the church has raised.  So we don’t know her, really, but she was there.

The second Mary is said to be the sister of Jesus’s mother, although it seems odd to have two sisters named Mary.  She is Mary the wife of Clopas.  That doesn’t help us much.  But she too was there with the others, as Jesus died.

The third is Mary of Magdala, Mary Magdalene.  In one sense we know quite a lot about her – but it’s still only enough to leave us with a lot of tantalisingly unanswered questions.  This Mary had certainly lived a colourful life.  She had been rescued from some personal abyss, it seems by Jesus.  Her devotion to him is complete, and she too is there as he dies.

Where they were, these three Marys, was where the Roman occupying government crucified criminals, those they didn’t like, anyone seen as a possible enemy of the state – it surely was a very dreadful place.  But doesn’t the whole scene around them, as they waited there, epitomise much that we hear and see daily now?  Golgothas are familiar now in Syria or Nigeria, in Ukraine or Yemen… and a dozen other places.  Jesus was sharing the totality of our 21^st century atrocity, mindless barbarism and utter cruelty.   He knew and shared the hideous treatment of 20 Coptic Christian men on a beach in Libya. The perpetrators of these things render themselves less than human.  Jesus knew all this intimately and personally. 

With him stood these three women, until it was possible for them to take him down and bear him away for burial.  They too bore the horror of the thing and its mindless injustice and inhumanity, to say nothing of their personal grief and helplessness.  But they stayed there.  They looked for no escape.  They bore reality.  Love and sorrow went hand in hand. 

On Good Friday we can say, because we know, that there is no way around human evil.  The only road is through it, knowing about it, bearing it, gathering up the children, understanding it or being utterly bewildered, trusting that one morning God will bring light and peace for all the wounded and broken-hearted.